The graffiti on the wall down the block from my student apartment in Paris was profane, referencing oil. I walked past it at least once a day in the winter and spring of 1991 on my way to class at Reid Hall, the building shared by Middlebury’s School Abroad with a cluster of other American colleges. Often, I walked by twice, once to class and again in the evening on the way to the home of the family I was renting from; they lived in another apartment a few blocks away from mine.

It wasn’t the only reminder that the Gulf War was unpopular in that corner of France. Dinners with the family—included in my rent and at least as educational as my semester of classes—featured regular conversations about current events.

All this returned with the clarity of a formative moment after the November 13 terrorist attacks on Paris. I work in a newsroom, so I spent the evening reading about those harrowing events unfolding across the Atlantic. The next morning, I woke after a lengthy dream, in which I was walking home from work through the darkened Paris streets. I stopped at a small restaurant, nothing fancy, and felt I was known there, a regular. It was my first dream of Paris, and my first in French, in years.

I don’t want to name the Parisian family I lived with, but other students of the era who rented from them will no doubt know who I’m talking about. The father was a school principal and an ardent Socialist, and the mother, his younger second wife, was Syrian. She had a young son, maybe eight or nine years old, whom she’d brought with her when she left Syria.

They were wonderful people, and I did indeed learn as much from them as from my classes. After spending my first five days in Paris with no one but the family, speaking nothing but French, I showed up at Reid Hall for the first day of class, and the first word I heard was a slack “Hey,” one of several cultural divides that proved hard to navigate that semester.

Most Thursday nights were couscous nights at the family’s apartment, and I remember them still as some of the best meals of my life. Often visitors—usually from another part of the Arab world or North Africa—would come by, bearing Tunisian pastries or dates stuffed with a mix of cheese and honey.

Conversation turned to the Gulf War. As the lone American at the table, I was often called on to explain the ways of my government. I wasn’t a supporter of the war, but I wasn’t prepared to offer a heartfelt denunciation either. Diffidence was my shield against my fellow diners’ questions. At one point, we decided that we’d consider me a Swede, officially neutral.

The question, or entreaty, that stayed with me from those conversations, because it is so resistant to solutions, was Pourquoi est-ce que les Etats-Unis peut pas fouter la paix au Moyen Orient?

Why can’t the United States leave the Middle East the fuck alone? Our economy’s thirst for oil is such that this question struck me, even then, as rhetorical or unanswerable.

Perhaps that was a failure on my part. Would another student in my seat at the dinner table have decided to seek an answer, or at least to reassure a Syrian woman resettled in Paris that her question was worth answering, even haltingly and incompletely?

To recall that question again, posed by a Syrian, reminds me that the conflict now manifesting itself in terrorist attacks and waves of refugees was already under way, visible and audible and angry, 25 years ago.

Alex Hanson ’92 is the features editor at Valley News, a daily paper in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/road-taken-deja-vu/feed/0The Life and Times of Rick Hodeshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2015/11/06/the-life-and-times-of-rick-hodes/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2015/11/06/the-life-and-times-of-rick-hodes/#commentsFri, 06 Nov 2015 14:56:36 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14521

A memory Rick Hodes ’75 has from early in his career doesn’t arise often, but when it does, it returns in the same vivid detail.

It’s 1985, and he’s standing among hundreds of gaunt, emaciated people who have hardly eaten in weeks. Hours before, they were dirty, but now they’re clean, and their heads have been shaved. Some wear oversized blue jeans and T-shirts; others are in handsome tuxedos and slinky evening gowns. The irony of the clothing isn’t lost on them—they’re laughing about it, and Hodes is laughing with them.

At the time, he was a medical resident at Johns Hopkins University, spending his vacation volunteering in Ethiopia, where one of the 20th-century’s worst famines was raging. Tens of thousands were wandering the countryside in search of food, while a civil war fueled the chaos.

Starving people arrived at the camp where Hodes was stationed, and were divided by gender, cleaned in mass showers, and deloused. The staff gave them new outfits donated by Western relief organizations and burned what they’d arrived in.

This was his first trip to Ethiopia. Apart from that brief moment when the clothing’s irony trumped the suffering, the famine remains the most haunting thing Hodes has ever witnessed.

After a month, he returned to Baltimore, not sure he’d ever return.

On a rainy Friday afternoon 30 years later, Hodes is riding in the back of his Suzuki along a busy avenue in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s sprawling capital. He sees a man with a severely contorted posture standing at the mouth of an alleyway and orders his driver to pull over. His assistant, Kaleab, gets out and approaches the man to tell him about the free clinic Hodes runs at Yekatit 12, a nearby public hospital. That’s where we’re heading now.

We’re 15 minutes late by the time we pull into the parking lot. Hodes runs two clinics—this one and another—under the auspices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a relief agency based in New York City. He’s not a tall man, standing just 5’3”, and today he’s wearing an oversized yellow raincoat that he’s left unzipped. He walks through the crowded waiting room, a stethoscope hanging from his neck and blank flashcards and several pens tucked into the breast pocket of his button-down shirt. If a patient needs, say, a follow-up chest X-ray, he’ll write a note on a card, hand it to the patient, and ask them to bring it on their next visit.

He slips into the cramped examination room, places his backpack on a box of surgical gloves and settles into a chair. I push aside a pile of blank referral slips to make room for myself on the windowsill behind him. The paint is coming off the room’s walls and an untidy stack of papers covers the only sink. A nurse, Sister Tena, beckons patients one by one from the waiting room.

Each patient will undress in front of a large group that includes two medical students from the University of Rochester who are interning with Hodes for the summer, several local volunteers, Kaleab, and me. Across the room, another nurse and volunteer administer a test to cardiac patients who have been prescribed Warfarin, a blood thinner. There are easily a dozen people in the room at any given time.

Watching Hodes work is like watching an expert chess player face several opponents at once. He greets each patient warmly, quickly assesses the problem without blinking, and then makes his move. He ups a young man’s Warfarin dosage and asks him to return the following week.

“Next.”

He holds a girl’s spine X-ray to the room’s overhead light and tells Kaleab which surgeon she should see.

“She’s a USA case, put her on the list for Kamal.”

“Next.”

Although he’s lived in Ethiopia for 28 years, Hodes is proficient, but not fluent, in Amharic—theofficial language—so he speaks in English and Sister Tena translates. He takes extra time with children. He’s jocular with the boys: “Are the barbers on strike? Sister, tell him if his hair gets too long, it’ll crunch his back.” And he’s grandfatherly with the girls: “No boyfriends until you’re done with school…tell her she needs to study hard so she can replace me.”

Hodes returned to Ethiopia just nine months after his first visit. He’d applied for a Fulbright grant to work in Zimbabwe, but Fulbright instead offered him a job teaching medical students at Addis Ababa University. This time, he stayed for nearly three years before returning to the States to enter a private practice in Washington, D.C. He liked working in D.C.; it seemed a good place to pursue a career in international health. Soon enough, though, he was on a plane back to Addis Ababa.

By the early 1990s, Ethiopia’s 17-year civil war was coming to a close and the sitting government of Mengistu Haile Mariam was on the verge of collapse. Hodes signed on with JDC to help run a clinic for Ethiopian Jews waiting to immigrate to Israel. He led a team of doctors during Operation Solomon, the largest civilian airlift in world history: nearly 14,400 Ethiopian Jews were evacuated to Israel in less than 36 hours. Following the airlift, he remained in Ethiopia and has been caring for patients ever since.

After he’s seen all of his patients at Yekatit 12, we walk back to the Suzuki, and Hodes explains to me he never expected, as a younger man, that he’d live the majority of his adult life abroad. Behind the clinic’s derelict walls stands a new, modern hospital that will open within a year. Hodes’s clinic has been offered a space in the new building, but he shrugs at the thought. “We’re perfectly happy to stay where we are.”

Brand-new buildings are a common sight in Addis, as Ethiopia is developing rapidly—its GDP is growing at nearly 11 percent per year. However, the country remains extremely poor and nowhere is this more evident than at our next stop: Mother Teresa’s Mission, run by the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic congregation where Hodes has been volunteering more than a decade.

We’re not there long. Hodes listens to a few hearts, checks in with the nuns, and visits with several patients. I meet Tilahun, a young boy who lost a leg to cancer and is still undergoing chemotherapy. When affordable cancer drugs for Tilahun couldn’t be found in Ethiopia, Hodes flew to India to get them. The Mission is where Hodes first met three of his five adopted sons, orphaned street kids who had been brought in with grave medical issues. Without health insurance, they would have never received the proper treatment, so he decided to adopt them—but he asked God first.

We leave the Mission, and the driver drops me at the guesthouse where I’m staying. Hodes tells me to shower quickly and make the short walk to his house for Shabbat dinner.

The Hodes residence includes a main house and, behind that, two small dwellings for visitors. During the day, a group of kids, mostly recovering spine patients, play soccer in the driveway. Surgery has afforded them previously uncharted lung capacities, so they play vigorously. Hodes tells them no sports for six months following surgery, but they don’t always listen. The titanium rods holding their new backs together can break, although it’s uncommon.

In the main house’s living room, medical textbooks, fiction, nonfiction, and Hebrew prayer books line the bookshelves. Hodes was raised in a secular Jewish household in Syosset, Long Island, though he now identifies as Modern Orthodox after spending several months studying at a remedial yeshiva in Israel. He prays three times daily and has placed mezuzot— small cases containing a verse from Deuteronomy— on all his doorposts. Jews are to touch these whenever they come and go, then kiss their hands, but Hodes never does for fear of germs.

During his time in Israel, he says he discovered a wisdom and spirituality in Judaism he’d never sensed when he was younger. He insists he’s a doctor by nature, not faith, but allows that faith does give his life structure and, at times, has guided how he practices medicine. He once brought two boys with cancer home from the Mission and started their chemotherapy on his front porch. They had the same shoe size, which he took as a sign from God they should not be split up.

In 1994, he found spiritual guidance especially important when he arrived in Goma, Zaire—what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo—to treat cholera in a refugee camp for Rwandans fleeing the genocide. To cross the camp, Hodes recalls needing to get on the back of the “body truck,” a dump truck used to transport the newly dead to mass graves. Before leaving Addis for Goma, he phoned a rabbi he knew in Los
Angeles with a serious, moral question: who to treat and who to let go? That rabbi referred the question to a more senior rabbi in Philadelphia who sent Hodes a fax just before he left: “All life is precious. Treat them in the order they come to you.”

I arrive at Hodes’s house an hour or so after being dropped off and find a large group gathered, which includes an impressive Middlebury contingent. There’s professor Claudia Cooper and her son, Nick Rogerson, who are in Ethiopia for several weeks with a group of students to study development practices; Mesfin, Hodes’s youngest son, home from college; the two medical students from Rochester; and two young Americans—one, a medical student—who are visiting from their home in Israel. Also among the group: Bayilign, a former child soldier during the civil war, who worked for Hodes before becoming a nurse; and a mother with her child. The boy had heart surgery in India several years ago, and the pair came to Addis for his checkup. Families like theirs have little money, so they stay at Hodes’s house while the patient sees doctors, recovers from surgery, or receives more care.

We form a circle, and one of the medical students distributes an eclectic mix of hats—fezzes, a Rastafarian hat with faux dreadlocks, cartoonish menorah-hats with floppy candles. Hodes begins each Shabbat with Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer.” We join hands, and those of us unfamiliar with the lyrics sing timidly.

I’d sing out love between my brothers and my sisters

All over this la-a-and.

Across the room from me, Hodes leads the singing in a quiet, melodic voice. His eyes are downcast, and he looks tired. The sight of his menorah hat, its candles akimbo, is somehow humorless.

Next we sing the traditional song to welcome the Sabbath, “Shalom Aleichem.” Then Hodes circles the room, places both hands on each child’s head and whispers a blessing. He circles again, this time with several loaves of bread, breaking off pieces and tossing them to each guest.

Before I arrived in Ethiopia, Hodes flooded my email inbox with background reading. There was too much, honestly, and some seemed more relevant than others. The first email contained the remarks President Ron Liebowitz delivered when the College awarded Hodes an honorary degree in 2006; next was an Economist article comparing poverty in the Congo and Appalachia. Scrolling down, I found still more speeches, profiles, one of his son’s college essays, and more.

I skipped ahead to a commencement address he delivered at Brandeis in 2013. Some of the material he used—namely quotes from St. Francis of Assisi and Wayne Gretzky—I’d hear again during my week with him in Addis. His graduation speech began as many do, displaying humility as he questioned whether he was up to the challenge at hand.However, he makes this familiar move surprising by equating his task as speaker with the marital duties weighing on Senator John Warner the night he became actress Elizabeth Taylor’s sixth husband. “I know what I have to do tonight; I’m just trying to think of a way of making it interesting.”

From there, he told an abridged version of his life’s story. Upon graduating from Middlebury in 1975 with a degree in geography, he hitchhiked to Fairbanks, Alaska. He set a very deliberate pace for his life there—he ran, hiked, and cross-country skied in the winter—and read prodigiously, mail ordering the major works of Leo Tolstoy, Miguel de Cervantes, Martin Buber, and others. No great epiphany led him to consider medical school, only an interest in international medicine dating back to junior high, when he’d read about Thomas Dooley, a missionary doctor.

He took his premed classes in Alaska and then matriculated at the University of Rochester. He became an internist, he said, because he liked the idea of having long-term relationships with patients. Next came his residency at Johns Hopkins and then Ethiopia.

Hodes’s speech at this point pivots to a story about an email his assistant had received from a college senior. The student was interested in medicine and had been offered a job in health care. His email asked “whether working with Dr. Hodes was worth risking a comfortable job in the U.S.”

“I wondered: ‘What can you learn from me?’” Hodes asked his audience rhetorically and then ventured an answer.

“I can teach you a completely different way of practicing medicine. I can show you how to start something from zero and grow it. I can teach you how one thing leads to another…and how things happen if you put years of your life into them.”

After reading the Brandeis speech, I opened another document titled “Grad Speech for the Self-Centered Sloths.”

“Dear Alon,” it began. “Congratulations on landing a job in health care. Great question you ask: ‘Is the work with Dr. Hodes worth RISKING a comfortable job here in the U.S.?’ (The exact wording is yours, the emphasis is mine).”

It took me a second, but I realized this was a response to the email Hodes referenced in his Brandeis speech. It was a sprawling 2,000 words and signed at the bottom by his assistant at the time, Menachem.

At the beginning, his tone was tongue-in-cheek.

“Hodes,” Menachem wrote, “chose to dedicate his life to the fascinating, vital, and unique problems of some of the sickest…most deformed…and occasionally the sweetest people on the planet. It is virtually all he does with his time. I have no idea why.”

“Rick’s a tough guy,” Menachem conceded, but “despite claims of daily meditation, he has the inner balance of a kid with cerebral palsy on a unicycle and the attention span of a hummingbird on amphetamines.”

And he had plenty to say about the frustrations that come with working as Hodes’s assistant.

“When Rick’s gone, it’s my job to go to the ATM [and] withdraw money…But what happens when Rick’s in Bangkok and the brothel eats his ATM card, leaving us on austerity for weeks? Huge problem, huge stress, complaints bombarding from all sides.”

Menachem started sounding less satirical and a bit more moralizing when he described the patients whose lives had been forever changed by Hodes: the child with severe scoliosis from polio, who Hodes found sleeping on the streets; the homeless girl who had her “mitral valve replaced in California and her Scheuermann’s kyphosis operated on while she was on anticoagulants in Mumbai”; the orphan with the “severe S-shaped spine” whose bus fare from the Sudanese border Hodes had reimbursed out of his own pocket.

“Tell me—what kind of asshole would consider maximizing comfort at age 22 when he could be doing something worthwhile? If the guy were married and had three college tuitions to pay, I’d understand it. But single and 22?”

“Most of the time I wish I had a comfortable American job like yours,” Menachem signed off cynically, wishing he, too, could“scrutinize the cost-effectiveness of dunning patients for their CAT scan copayments.”

His parting advice: “Get a nice car, a comfy job, and hope for a big-boobed babe in the cubicle next door.”

I made a note to ask Hodes about Menachem once I was in Ethiopia. I even looked him up on LinkedIn and considered adding him.

Hodes’s hardest day, his “marathon day,” as he calls it, is on the day of rest. On Saturday at 8 a.m., he and I pile into the Suzuki, along with the two Rochester medical students, and the American medical student studying in Israel who’d attended the Shabbat dinner. We drive to Hodes’s second clinic, which is located at a private hospital called Cure.

The first patient is a boy who recently had spine surgery in Addis Ababa, when a team of American surgeons visited last. Hodes takes his hand and walks him back to the waiting room.

To Sister Tena, who is translating, he says, “Tell them that this boy was completely paralyzed. And now he’s walking.” The boy shyly takes a few steps and everyone claps and cheers.

While some surgeries are done in Ethiopia, the majority of Hodes’s spine patients fly to Ghana, where a prominent Ghanaian spine surgeon, Oheneba Boachie-Adjei, operates at a nonprofit hospital in Accra. He previously practiced in New York and now heads his own NGO. In
Accra, patients spend three to four months in traction, a process that involves a metal halo being fitted around each patient’s head and tightened against the skull. To allow for patient mobility, they are placed inframes with wheels, a contraption that slightly resembles the luggage carts parked in hotel lobbies.

Each frame has a pulley system that attaches to the halo, allowing for tension to be applied, which elongates the patient’s spine. Nurses start the weight around five pounds, then gradually increase the weight over three weeks, ending at around half the patient’s body weight. In the pictures, traction looks painful and medieval, but the patients are often smiling, and playing cards or watching television. They’re taken out of their frames when they sleep and are hooked into a pulley system anchored at the bed’s head and foot.

When the patient is ready for surgery, Boachie-Adjei and his team cut into their backs and reconfigure the spine either by removing or reconstructing the vertebrae. They then screw the titanium rods into place for support. Afterward, patients remain in Ghana typically for about two months, undergoing physical therapy.

Today the Cure clinic has around a dozen new spine patients. Each new patient needs to be photographed in about twenty different positions, which Hodes does himself. If he had more money, he says, he’d hire a photographer. Because these deformities are three-dimensional in nature, the pictures allow him and the surgeons to see all the different angles and contours of the problem.

For each patient, Hodes will photograph their face, followed by a picture of them with the person who brought them to the clinic. He then has patients remove their shirts and photographs them facing forward, arms down. Next he photographs them to the side, asking them to stand with their arms folded across their chests. Sister Tena, with a Sharpie pen, draws lines at the top and bottom of the patients’ kneecaps and Hodes photographs how closely their arms, resting at their sides, come to the kneecaps, which gives him a sense of each patient’s lung capacity.

Then he measures the patients’ ATRs—the angle of trunk rotation—which is basically how sharply one side of their back differs from the other. Some of these patients have severe deformities—for instance, T-10, a vertebra in the middle back, might in reality be higher than T-1, which is just below the neck, because the patient’s spine is shaped like a saxophone.

Hodes has little use for the standard American scoliometer, which only measures up to 30 degrees. And in severe cases, the scoliometer app on his iPhone is useless because it also doesn’t go high enough (only to 50 degrees). With spines bent or twisted more than 50 degrees, Hodes uses an angle finder called a Dasco Pro, which sailors use to measure a boat’s tilt. He calls it “the boat.”

Mid-morning, Mesfin, Hodes’s youngest son, calls. There’s a funeral at the synagogue, and they need one more Jewish man to form a minyan, a group of 10 required for certain prayers.

“I’m not going to the synagogue with a waiting room like this,” Hodes says. Theologically, he justifies working on Saturday because if you save a life on the Sabbath, you can break all its rules.

The only other candidate is the medical student visiting from Israel, who volunteers. Hodes wields his iPhone in one hand and the young man’s in the other and arranges someone to take him to the funeral.

In the afternoon, Hodes sees a group of spine patients who’ve recently returned from Ghana. Since space is limited, he first sees the girls, then the boys. Both groups are chatty as they have spent the past several months constantly in one another’s presence. Some have plastic braces fitted around their torsos that they’ll keep on for at least six more months.

When surgeries are successful, they’re life changing—patients can breathe and eat normally for the first time in their lives. But they’re also incredibly risky. Four of Hodes’s patients have died on the operating table, and four others have become permanently paralyzed.

(One week later at Cure, I watched as Hodes explained to a crying woman that her son, who was able to walk when he left for Ghana, would return to Ethiopia completely paralyzed. “I don’t live in the world of miracles, I live in the world of medicine, and it’s not likely he’ll walk again,” he said.)

Later that afternoon, the medical student returns from the minyan and after Hodes has seen all his patients, we pack the car and return home. I sit at the dining room table and look over my notes while Hodes and the young man talk in the hallway. Kaleab organizes a pile of X-rays for Hodes to look at and then departs.

Eventually, the young man leaves, and Hodes comes in and sits down with me.

He’s beaming.

“That’s Alon!” he says.

He sees in my face that I don’t register.

“Alon, Dear Alon.”

After I finish laughing in utter disbelief, I wonder aloud how Menachem will respond to the news that Alon made his way to Ethiopia at long last.

Hodes gives me a confused look.

“Menachem didn’t write that email. I wrote that email!”

When Hodes was living in Alaska, he read “Three Questions,” a Tolstoy short story that has stuck with him to this day.A king, hoping to forever avoid failure, seeks the answers to three questions: What is the right time to begin everything? Who were the right people to listen to? And what is the most important thing to do? Wise men offer answers, but none are conclusive, so the king consults a hermit, who he finds digging in front of his hut near the edge of a forest. The hermit gives no answer, but the king sees the hermit is tired and stays to help dig instead of returning to the palace.

Suddenly, a bleeding man stumbles from the forest and the king takes him into the hermit’s hut and treats his wounds into the night. The next morning, the man wakes and admits he’d been plotting to ambush the king on his return from the hut, but the king’s knights had found and wounded him. He’d just barely escaped. He pledges his loyalty to the king for having saved his life. As the king makes to leave, he asks the hermit the three questions once more.

But he had his answer, the hermit explains. Had he not taken pity on the hermit, his enemy would have ambushed him. Had he not treated his enemy’s wounds, they would not have made peace.

The only important time, then, is now. The most important person is the one you’re with. And the most important thing is to do good to him.

Wyatt Orme ’12 has written for High Country News, Al Jazeera, and National Public Radio.He’s currentlyreporting from Rwanda, a posting funded, in part, by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx with my two sisters and immigrant mother. On our stoop, neighbors socialized and celebrated with barbecues, domino games, and merengue dancing. These moments colored my childhood with the feeling of home. Yet I often went to sleep to the sound of gunshots. In those moments, I remained stiff in bed for fear of being discovered by the darkness outside. My building, the epicenter of the drug trade on my city block, was framed with sturdy metal railings that led to the entrance. I was nine years old when, one morning, I noticed that one of those railings had been dented with a deep groove, caused, my mother later told me, by one of our neighbors throwing his wife out a fifth-story window.

My mother, traumatized by the incident, lived in increasing fear that the violence my sisters and I witnessed would overtake our lives—that our visceral poverty meant that the neighbors with whom we lived and shared space could harm us. We were tied to the Bronx, but my mother’s anxieties spurred her into action. She secured boarding school spots for us outside of the city, and soon my sisters and I were driving to Connecticut in a borrowed car to pristine, manicured boarding-school campuses with full scholarships—and fear—in tow.

The disparity between my Bronx home and the luxury of New England’s unlocked doors, abundant food, and quiet nights made me realize other forms of violence existed. Though we ran away to escape tragedy, I encountered new horrors: racism, classism, and the quiet violence of gender policing that happens at a prestigious all-girls boarding school. I discovered that my all-girls school was not really for all girls. I received many tips about the nature of my clothes and the right way to speak. I learned I did not measure up to my peers. I came to believe that if my future stood any chance of success, I would do well to heed the glances, the unsolicited advice, and the public shaming that were for my “own good” in order to grow into the “right” kind of woman. My Black body, with its large curves, unruly hair—as well as the scent of poverty still clinging to my clothes—made me a prime target for victimization from my peers, my teachers, and a system of education that privileges those who don’t look like me. Fearing persecution, I learned to erase myself as a way to survive.

With the new aroma of boarding-school pedigree now on my khakis, doors of opportunity, otherwise closed, opened for me. I now operated as an exception to the rule because I’d learned to be something other than me. But despite the good intentions of others, I still felt as if I did not belong. The course work that ignored my reality, the reminders of the charity bestowed upon me, or the gangsta-themed parties my peers threw made it clear I was in borrowed space. I suffocated with the pain of being treated as if I were invisible.

Even in the hallowed halls of privilege, even years after fearful nights in the Bronx, my safety continued to be at stake. I was—and am still—not safe to be my full, authentic self. I, along with so many Black people, am obsessively preoccupied with my safety and the protection of my humanity. For us, waking up is an act of courage, an act of resistance against the sanitization of our existence.

In some measures, I am light-years from that Bronx stoop. I work at Yale—at the University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence—and our mission is to use the power of emotions to create a more effective and compassionate society. In that vein, I have the honor of supporting educators to develop their emotional intelligence skills so they can create emotionally intelligent and safe schools.

And yet I still walk in the world in fear.

I see Freddie Gray.

Eric Garner.

Trayvon Martin.

Renisha McBride.

Rekia Boyd.

Michael Brown.

Walter Scott.

And, most recently, Sandra Bland and Sam Dubose.

I ask myself: If they were not Black, would they still be alive today?

If I were in their exact situation, would my name be on that list?

Would yours?

These are important questions to consider because they require us to reflect on the role of race in our society. For generations we have lived in a society built upon the interests of white individuals and the belief that white people are dominant and normative. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of the arc of the moral universe. He said it is long, but it bends towards justice. And while we, as a nation, have made strides since King’s assassination, some days that arc seems longer than ever.

Even with the election of our nation’s first Black president, the war against Blackness is alive and well. Events in Baltimore, Staten Island, Ferguson, Charleston, and Cincinnati have highlighted this. As an educator, researcher, and activist, I think about how people, especially young people, are digesting these events. I think ceaselessly about what Black youth and young people of color are learning about themselves, about their lives. Many consume narratives of violence every day—living this violence the same way I did as a child in the Bronx— through police brutality, poverty, gentrification, and systemic injustice. They learn very early that their personhood is suspicious and terrifying. They are constantly on the verge of becoming Aiyanna Stanley-Jones or Tamir Rice.

And this terrifies me.

After Middlebury, when I taught middle school students in the Bronx, I would use statistics to engage my students in conversations about race and activism. A 2014 study by the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Education revealed that Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students. Additionally, multiple studies have found that Black students receive harsher punishments than their white peers for the same infractions.

This continues into adulthood. Black people comprise nearly half of the 2.3 million incarcerated Americans, and they are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people.

I would look at my beautiful, curious students, and I would want to damn those statistics.

While I could not control the chaos of my students’ lives—the instability of their homes, the uncertainty of their next meal, the loud neighbors that kept them from sleep—Iprovided them with a safe and loving classroom where they could not only learn but thrive. I taught them necessary survival skills like code switching, writing and speaking persuasively, and understanding how data and media can be manipulated.

The school where I taught—with its overcrowded classrooms, rodent infestation, lack of textbooks, overworked and sometimes disengaged teachers, and prisonlike school safety guards—sent children the message that their dreams could only live within the school’s metal window gates. So I took them out of those gates. We went on class trips to museums and libraries. We walked the campus at Columbia, where I earned my doctorate. And we traveled north to Vermont, to my dear Middlebury, because I wanted my students to know they deserved space at our nation’s finest institutions.

I taught my students how to create meaningful actions to challenge and change the problematic systems that they inhabit. And I equipped them with love, kindness, and acceptance so they could mediate the violence many of them were already experiencing. I showed my students they mattered despite everything else in their lives telling them otherwise. I answered the phone when they called. I listened when they needed someone to listen. I stayed after school when they were confused by something I had taught earlier. And I told them I loved them every opportunity I had. I also taught my students how to seek support and advocate for themselves—and for others. I included their narratives and stories into my lessons so they could learn to value and love themselves, so they could feel proud of who they were, and so they wouldn’t have to endure the trauma of erasing themselves as I did.

But this wasn’t enough. I continued to fear for my students’ lives at home and in school. And this fear is what motivates my life’s trajectory to ensure safety for all. It is the reason I researched teachers’ preparedness to confront bullying during my doctoral studies. It is why I now travel the country and world to equip adults and youth with the skills of emotional intelligence. It’s why I’m writing this essay.

My success does not demonstrate what Black folks can achieve. It’s a reminder of what is kept from us. And I have to own the many privileges I have that allow me to tell my own story and speak up against a system that benefits me.

I am a light-skinned Black woman, which means my Blackness is preferred over the Blackness of my darker-skinned sisters and brothers. I have greater proximity to whiteness, to the acceptable standards of beauty. I’ve also been granted access to prestigious networks of power through attending and working at some of the nation’s elite secondary schools and universities. However, I still do not have the privilege to walk in the world without fear for my safety. I am still Black. I’m still more likely to be subject to the structural violence of dilapidated neighborhoods, subpar health care, failing schools, over-policing, and—worse—the insidious brainwashing that manipulates Black people into hating and devaluing our own existence.

Even in this highly racialized environment, however, there’s room for healing and growth. I strive to do work that empowers others to realize their value and potential and to fight for justice. However, the work should not rest only on the shoulders of people of color. This work for racial justice is all of our work. It’s a collective struggle for our shared humanity. Racial equity is a national imperative that requires purging our hate of Blackness and revising the way our country functions.

We cannot shift our current state of affairs if we shy away from painful and difficult discourse about racial injustice. These conversations have the potential to enlighten us so we can prevent doing inadvertent harm through ignorance and implicit bias—so we can truly see each other, and so we can begin to heal.

We cannot afford to walk away, to turn off our screens, and to carry on with our comfortable lives. None of us, especially those in power, have the right to be comfortable. It’s through discomfort we learn and transform most. Questioning, challenging, and curbing racial injustices is everyone’s job.

All of us must be compassionate. We must be open to other experiences, and we must learn to accept others and ourselves for everything we are—and everything we are not. We must fight for ourselves and for each other. And we must begin to shift the violent course of history to one of peace, love, and mutual understanding. I have faith in us. What I ask is simple: for Black lives to be seen, to be acknowledged as human, to be treated with dignity. Our shared humanity depends on this.

Dena Simmons ’05 is the director of implementation at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. She writes for Bright, which can be found at medium.com/bright and is a veteran of the TED talk circuit. Her TEDx talks titled “Its 10:00 p.m. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?” and“What Do You Do If a Student Comes At You With Scissors?” are available on YouTube. In November, she is speaking at TED Talks Live in New York.

After I graduated from Middlebury, I waited tables. I found pleasure in learning long wine lists, working by candlelight, and timing 12-course tasting menus to the minute. I am persnickety by nature, which is excellent for high-stakes fine-dining restaurants where minutia like matching all the handles of the oyster forks at Table 34 takes on astounding importance. But serving was not what I imagined for myself post college. In the summer and fall of 2010, I interviewed for a few editorial assistant positions and almost got a job in management consulting. Eventually, by winter, I took what I thought was an editorial research position at a business-to-business journal, but it was actually telemarketing. Surprise! The job didn’t pay enough to cover my rent, student loan payments, and living expenses, so I quit in May and got a job serving. I worked first in Portland, Maine, and then in Washington, D.C., where I served at the most-booked restaurant in the country for three-and-a-half years.

Occasionally my friends and relatives expressed confusion about why someone—me—with a degree in international studies was scraping plates and cleaning out drip trays for a living. But here’s the thing—just as Professor Jay West taught me to love 19th-century German literature, angry patrons and drug-addled chefs taught me never to feel above anything. I toughened up and learned to take responsibility. I also learned salmon roe kohlrabi foam exists (but maybe shouldn’t); anything can be made into a velouté; and grad school is not always the answer—even though, late one night, smelling like truffle oil and sitting on a bus next to a vomiting sous chef, I thought it might be. I applied to MFA programs and got waitlisted.

When I graduated from college, part of me believed the world had a perfect, golden niche waiting to be filled with my skills and abilities. This is embarrassing and obviously not the case. In her opening address to Middlebury, incoming president Laurie Patton said students “increasingly must create their own worlds—their own forms of employment, their own ways of being in the world.” That’s a great sentiment, and I think it’s true.

Eventually I left serving, and after several months of scrambling/freelancing (and nights spent staring at CodeAcademy, wishing I might magically become a Javascript genius), I got an editing job I love. Working in an office is different than working in a restaurant: it makes small talk easier, and it’s nice to get a lunch break. But part of me misses the hustle and delicacy of restaurants—and the feeling of being in a club of people who choose to work in the shadows of everyone else’s lives. More than anything, I still believe my success as a person shouldn’t be measured by the job I have or don’t have.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because of all the talk about the relevancy of a liberal arts education—whether courses on European structuralism sufficiently prepare students to meet the demands of today’s job market. But the liberal arts are also about adaptability, persistence, intellectual generosity, restlessness, tradition, and grit.

Middlebury allowed me, even in moments of selfish, myopic despair, to step back and find perspective. And as for structuralism, I remember hearing my trendy restaurant’s spring menu—some elevation of local honey and stone-cooked peasant bread—and thinking of nothing but Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction.

Rachel Siviski ’10 still enjoys finding just the right wine to pair with dinner. She lives with friends in Vermont.

As Ron Liebowitz enters the twilight of his presidency, we asked him to reflect on the new challenges that leaders in higher education can expect to face, while examining where these challenges came from and how they can be confronted.

What challenges will future leaders of colleges and universities face that presidents of the last decade either didn’t face or faced only in
limited ways?

At the risk of annoying a whole lot of people, I will start with the issues of cost and relevance. I tried out this issue as a topic of conversation with my faculty colleagues almost three years ago, and let’s just say it was not the most popular topic I ever introduced for collegial dialogue. And I can understand why. Yet it is something that the private institutions, especially, cannot afford to ignore, as the cost of such an education is now around $250,000 for the four-year BA degree.

This figure becomes even more astounding when one learns that the annual cost (room, board, and tuition) of around $60,000 represents only about 70 percent of the actual cost of that education per student. Annual gifts and earnings from the endowment provide what amounts to a hidden “scholarship” of more than $20,000 to even those who pay the full price.

This leads to the question of relevance, whether a degree today ensures what it did for earlier generations…

Right. Our current students are entering a world vastly different than the one their parents and grandparents encountered when they graduated from college. And people want to know: is a liberal arts degree worth worth the investment.And this holds true for everyone, even those most able to afford this high cost.

As taboo as it might be to say aloud, when one is paying a quarter of a million dollars for an education, one of the things one inevitably considers is whether such an investment is relevant to one’s son’s or daughter’s future—whether the four years will help them acquire the knowledge, character, habits of the mind, and skills necessary to compete in a world that is very different from just a generation ago. More and more parents are beginning to notice that the education that worked for them 25 or 30 years ago will not suffice for this generation.

Of course inside the academy and at Middlebury we all know the value of a liberal arts education: it is, in the long term, second to none in preparing young adults for a fulfilling and productive life. Yet, the many defenses of a liberal arts education that are offered up more and more frequently, while convincing to those already committed, are not fully understood by the uninitiated. Unfortunately, this group represents an overwhelming majority of families with soon-to-be college-bound children.

What, then, is the solution, or a solution, to this information or curricular gap?

Well, we need to continue to extol the virtues of having generations of liberally educated graduates while, at the same time, building on what a liberal arts education has traditionally offered students. That is, the 21st-century version of the liberal arts, different from the 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century versions, should evolve as its predecessors have done and include components that require students to experiment, conceive, design, build, and engage in uncertainty. It needs to provide the opportunity for students to take all they learn from studying across multiple disciplines and through different modes of inquiry and apply their learning to real-world challenges, questions, and numerous unknowns. Students need the opportunity to take risks, experience failure, and learn lessons from such failure without fear of a bad grade or having to wait until their first job or endeavor after graduation.

The combination of intense specialization and technological innovation, spread so easily and rapidly over the past decade as the result of globalization, requires the liberal arts to evolve and become more dynamic. It needn’t become diluted or beholden solely to the trendy or the here and now. Rather, it needs to equip its students not only with the timeless virtues of the liberal arts of the past but also with the tools, perspectives, and experience necessary to adapt to our rapidly changing and competitive world.

The two Department of Energy Solar Decathlon competitions, the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) summer program, the Center for Social Entrepreneurship, MiddCORE, Middlebury FoodWorks, our faculty-student summer research program, and the annual Spring Student Symposium are all examples of programs that can define, complement, and transform a traditional liberal arts education. These programs provide opportunities for students to follow up their course work with experimentation, design work, problem solving, collaboration, and the experience of creating something new, or at least the setting out to do so. Failure is a common and inevitable part of each program. What one learns in the process is invaluable: students graduate possessing a combined breadth of knowledge and set of skills that are today so necessary to succeed in a highly competitive and increasingly specialized world.

And so why is this so different now from what presidents faced 10, 20, and 30 years ago?

As I mentioned previously, the world has changed dramatically since many of the faculty and the parents of our current students were themselves in college, and the rapid pace of change challenges our education systems, from kindergarten through higher education. It has become harder and harder to keep up and evolve with the times and what they demand from our graduates. It remains to be seen if colleges and universities, let alone K–12 schools, can blend the best of what I would call traditional pedagogies with what might be called new pedagogies that recognize the ways current and future generations of students will learn. We already see a large proportion of students shying away from text-based materials and gravitating almost naturally to digitized content. The attention span of the current generation of students is far shorter than it was 20 years ago, which translates for many into an inability to sit for 50 minutes and enjoy, let alone learn from, a lecture without texting or checking Facebook. Yet this should come as no surprise. At the same time, an expectation that faculty can and will adjust to these changes and do so seamlessly, while pursuing their research and professional obligations, is optimistic, at least in many of our disciplines.

Robust and generous faculty-development programs are essential if higher education as we know it is to thrive in this century. And a willingness on the part of faculty to engage in such professional development is equally—and perhaps more—essential.

While our faculty are incredibly committed to and excel at the human-intensive pedagogy that sits at the core of a residential liberal arts college education, the incentive for faculty to build upon that pedagogy and amend the curriculum accordingly to meet the needs of students is not quite apparent, or at least not obviously so. And therein lies the challenge for current and future presidents of colleges and universities: to articulate creatively a vision for the liberal arts and higher education that is both timeless and time sensitive, and that recognizes how what was valuable in the past can serve as the foundation for the future. It must be a vision that motivates and inspires faculty, and one whose new pedagogies must be based on a deep understanding of one’s students, align with how those students learn, and allow for the kind of dynamism in both the pedagogy and curriculum essential for the 21st century.

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http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2015/02/06/old-chapel-looking-ahead/feed/0Felix Against the Barbarianshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/05/31/felix-against-the-barbarians/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/05/31/felix-against-the-barbarians/#commentsFri, 31 May 2013 13:52:37 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=12399

I. K&R Man
This story is not about—not just about—the kidnapping and probable murder of our classmate, Felix Batista ’77. But to know his full story, we must start here.

On December 10, 2008, Felix was having an early dinner in Saltillo, capital of the Mexican state of Coahuila, about three hours south of the Texas border. Americans know Saltillo best for the traditional clay tiles it exports to high-end kitchen designers and interior decorators; but the biggest employers, General Motors and Chrysler, operate a pair of automobile assembly plants. They have made the region relatively prosperous, fostering the growth of an upper-middle class, stirring patronage in the better eating establishments, and creating a boom in another industry: hostage taking.

One of the town’s best restaurants, El Mesón Principal del Norte, specializes in spit-roasted meat. Felix had ordered the goat. An American citizen born in Cuba and based in Miami, he was a consultant whose work took him to Mexico at least 20 times a year. He was dining with three associates, speaking fluent Spanish—the sort of scene our world-friendly college likes to imagine—when one of his two cell phones rang. The call came from a friend named Pilar Valdez, head of security for the Saltillo Industrial Group. He was being held by Los Zetas, the most vicious drug cartel in a nation dominated by cartels.

While the Zetas and other Mexican gangs have grown rich from smuggling narcotics and marijuana into the United States, in the past decade or so, kidnapping has provided a growing alternative revenue stream. Almost half of all Mexicans say they have been affected by kidnapping—having been taken themselves, having had a relative or friend abducted, or having received scam calls saying a loved one is being held. Relatives of victims often receive a finger or an ear to hurry negotiations along. The kidnappers go where the money is, focusing on the nation’s business class.

Which is why Felix was in Mexico. A security expert, he had given a pair of lectures to local businessmen, telling them how to respond in the event of a kidnapping. Keep calm, he told them. Don’t offer too much money. Felix knew what he was talking about; he had been instrumental in the release of some 100 hostages, according to the Houston-based firm he worked with, ASI Global. A “response consultant” with more than two decades’ experience, Felix was at the top of a growing profession called K&R, kidnapping and ransom.

Soon after Pilar Valdez called him, the man’s son came into the restaurant and sat at another table. Felix talked to the young man, then left the restaurant briefly and returned looking shaken. After a visit to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, Felix rejoined his dinner companions. He handed over his laptop, shoulder bag, and a cell phone—the one he used to call his family. “If I’m not back soon,” he said, “call these numbers.” He left a card with the contact information for ASI and for his wife, Lourdes. Then he stood out on the curb for half an hour.

Shortly after seven o’clock, two vehicles drove up. Pilar Valdez sat in one of them, a white Jeep Cherokee. He had been badly beaten. One of the men inside the SUV came out and put his arm around Felix. They talked briefly, and Felix got into the car. An hour later, Valdez was dropped off with a few pesos for transportation. Felix has not been seen since.

There is more to Felix’s story, entailing the usual corrupt officials, American diplomats, the FBI, the toxic outward flow of drugs to the States and the reverse flow of guns; Felix’s wife; their five grown children; his music and friendship and the scholarship in his name that reflects the best of the College.

But as you shall see, Felix himself provided the moral of the story. He once wrote to friends that his work in kidnapping and ransom was to fight “barbarism.” At a time when the purpose of the liberal arts is under challenge, Felix gives us an answer: a liberal education should nurture civilized souls like Felix Batista who can cross boundaries and carry a light into a barbarous world.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/05/31/felix-against-the-barbarians/feed/3Serene Velocityhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/05/23/serene-velocity/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/05/23/serene-velocity/#commentsThu, 23 May 2013 16:19:43 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=12298When Ted Perry first stepped foot on the Middlebury campus in 1978, having been lured away from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he held the lofty title of director of film, he discovered a college that had no film courses in its curriculum; it had no film equipment; it did not have a professional screening facility.

Now, look at that photograph on this page, an image captured by one of Ted’s former students. Look at that impish half grin; look at how Ted smiles as much with his eyes as with his mouth. It’s not hard to imagine him looking that way when he arrived at Middlebury 35 years ago, seeing a blank canvas stretched out before him. He surely delighted in imagining what could be, just as we can express a measure of delight in recognizing what has been.

Ted has worn many titles—too many to mention here, at least in any way that gives them proper weight—and has taught an array of bright students at Middlebury and elsewhere (Iowa, Texas, NYU), yet what has remained constant is a state of what colleague and friend Stephen Donadio has described as “serene velocity,” (which is also the title of a film that Ted has long admired).

This is what set Ted apart in the classroom—and as a scholar, as a teacher, and in the world of film, where he is held in such high regard. No doubt this state of serene velocity will accompany Ted into retirement, as he turns his attention and that impish smile to further avenues of exploration that await his attention.

A recent Sunday tested that theory. An overcast afternoon found Ted in Otter Creek Bakery with one of his grandsons, 10-year-old Sutton. As the young boy quietly enjoyed a giant chocolate cookie, Ted softly greeted other customers (a neighbor, a former chair of the Middlebury Board of Trustees). How serene (!).

“What a nice way to spend the afternoon,” a friend remarked.

“We’re about to go clean the third floor of the house, then we’re going to unpack and shelve my books. After that, we’re going swimming,” Ted replied, as casually as one would ask for a pack of sugar. “Now, when are we going canoeing in the Adirondacks…?”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/05/23/serene-velocity/feed/1Dalai Lamas—in History and in Personhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/10/dalai-lamas-in-history-and-in-person/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/10/dalai-lamas-in-history-and-in-person/#commentsWed, 10 Oct 2012 17:31:16 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=9984What is a Dalai Lama? And how is His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama different from (and similar to) the previous 13?

A week before His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s visit to Middlebury, a large audience at Dana Auditorium heard some answers to the questions, “What is a Dalai Lama?” and “Who is this Dalai Lama?” Professor William Waldron sketched the spiritual and temporal role Dalai Lamas have held since their rise to prominence in 16th century Tibet, adding insights about the particular life and role of Middlebury’s honored guest.

The title “Dalai Lama” itself suggests the complex history of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. “Lama” is Tibetan for “guru” or “teacher”; “Dalai” is Mongolian for “ocean.” The title is loosely translated as “Ocean of Merit” or “Ocean of Wisdom,” and Waldron explained how it harkens back to the Buddhist leaders’ patronage by Mongolian princes who ran—and defended—Tibet from the 13th through 17th centuries. Far from otherworldly spiritualists, these Buddhist lamas operated amidst Mongolian and Chinese political plays, with each power exercising control over Tibetans through their spiritual leaders.

Buddhism didn’t arrive in Tibet until the 7th century, and the monks who brought it from India were not entering a spiritual vacuum: practitioners of Tibet’s indigenous shamanic spiritual tradition, Bön, resisted the Buddhist influence. Originally armed pastoralists like the Mongolians, the Tibetans took to the Buddhist teachings of compassion. Bön and Buddhism ultimately developed a syncretic relationship, and during the four-century span prior to Mongolian political rule, it was the Buddhist monasteries who provided a stabilizing cultural force, serving as keepers of literacy and iconography, even lending money (similar to the role the Catholic monasteries played after the fall of the Roman Empire).

Waldron noted that while Dalai Lamas have for centuries wielded political and spiritual influence, it is the latter role Tibetans value most. Traditionally, the Dalai Lama is considered the reincarnation of the revered bodhisattva (or “enlightened being”) of compassion, Avalokiteshvara. Bodhisattvas cycle through many earthly lifetimes, delaying their own rest in nirvana in order to help liberate others from suffering. In the Tibetan Mahayana Buddhist tradition especially, Waldron noted, “the many bodhisattvas represent the potential for cultivating awakened properties within oneself.” This awakening, through meditation and other practices, allows a person to see reality without the ulterior motives and grasping of the ego; the awakened person is free to engage others with compassion and wisdom.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama was a toddler in his mud-and-stone village when a lengthy, detailed process identified him as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. Given the restless time into which he was born, he went from a closely tutored child in a Lhasa palace whose only exposure to technology was an old film projector, watches, and a telescope to a world traveler who counts among his friends prominent scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders. (His own education demanded decades of studying scriptures and the highly advanced logic of Buddhism; he earned the equivalent of a Ph.D. in philosophy and is the author of dozens of books.)

And although Waldron noted that the 14th Dalai Lama “is not the first to be beleaguered by politics,” the politics that have beleaguered His Holiness are of a modern scale. Fearing for his life during the increasingly restrictive Chinese occupation of Tibet, he fled in 1959 and found asylum in Dharamsala, India, with many other Tibetans. As Pico Iyer notes in his biography of the Dalai Lama, The Open Road, “One in five Tibetans—more than a million—died of starvation or in direct encounters with the Chinese. One in 10 was jailed; all but 13 of the more than 6,000 monasteries in Tibet were leveled.”

While he has tirelessly engaged in efforts on behalf of Tibet’s autonomy, His Holiness recently abdicated his political role as his people’s temporal leader (Waldron noted that his traditional political authority lodged mostly in central Tibet, but that this abdication nonetheless changes “the religious polity of classical Tibet”). He remains active fostering Tibet’s monastic and cultural traditions in exile while calling for a “global ethics” that supersedes religion or culture to engage and develop what is common to all humans—kindness, responsibility, and compassion. Toward this end, he regularly hosts conferences in Dharamsala that pursue questions about cognitive science and meditation, Buddhist doctrine and quantum mechanics, and commonalities among religions. This self-described “simple Buddhist monk” doesn’t claim to have universal answers, and in fact, suggests that while Buddhism works for him, it may not be a good fit for others. As a quote from the Buddha displayed in the Dalai Lama’s home temple in Dharamsala says, “As one assays gold by rubbing, cutting, and melting, so examine well my words and accept them, but not because you respect me.”

Tickets to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama are now sold out. Live video feeds will be provided to both Dana Auditorium and the McCullough Social Space during both of his talks. Seating for these on-campus video viewing areas is free and open to the public, and is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/10/dalai-lamas-in-history-and-in-person/feed/2Academy Honorshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/04/23/academy-honors/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/04/23/academy-honors/#respondMon, 23 Apr 2012 14:15:40 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=8075For over 200 years the American Academy of Arts & Sciences has been electing leading “thinkers and doers,” from George Washington to Albert Einstein. Recently the Academy announced its 2012 class and among those honored is volcanologist Katharine Cashman ’76, the Philip H. Knight Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Oregon.

Cashman’s research over the years has led to great insight into what triggers volcanic eruptions and has helped to predict those events. With a two-year Fulbright scholarship in New Zealand, where she earned a master’s in geology from Victoria University, and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins, she has spent her career researching volcanic hot spots on all seven continents. But her love for geology began at Middlebury. “I wouldn’t be a geologist if I hadn’t gone to Middlebury. First and foremost in terms of inspiration was Professor Peter Coney. From the very start, he treated all of his students as peers and professionals and truly challenged us to think for ourselves. Although sometimes frustrating, it was also exhilarating to be handed a problem and then have to figure it out.”

Another professor helped further Cashman’s interest in the study of volcanoes. David Folger, who had left Middlebury to work in Wood’s Hole, Mass., hired her as a research scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1979. He then encouraged her in a transfer to the Cascades Volcano Observatory after the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. Although she had studied active volcanoes in Antarctica, this was a turning point for her. She arrived at Mount St. Helens just months after the eruption. “The opportunity to work with the USGS team at Mount St. Helens convinced me that this was the direction that I wanted to pursue—I love studying geologic processes that happen on human time scales and that affect human populations because it means that I can indulge my love of solving scientific puzzles with the feeling that maybe something I do will ultimately help to reduce volcanic risk.”

Her impressive body of work has done that and more. And her accomplishments caught the attention of the Academy of Arts & Sciences. While normally Cashman would have gotten the notification of her election while at the University of Oregon, she is spending a three-year leave at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom as an AXA research chair and professor of volcanology. (AXA is a French insurance company that has recently started sponsoring research into environmental hazards.) So she received word she’d been chosen as a Fellow by the University of Oregon communications director. She says she felt “stunned” by the news—but obviously honored.

“It’s very humbling to be joining an honor society that includes so many people in my field, who I’ve looked up to all my career. The fact that my ‘class’ includes people like Hillary Clinton, Judy Woodruff, Andre Previn, Clint Eastwood, and Paul McCartney just seems surreal!”

As for opportunities that may open up for her, it’s too early to tell. But the Academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. For now, Cashman says, the announcement has led to some enjoyable personal benefits. “It reached several of my high school friends, from whom I’ve received a flood of e-mail. It’s been fun to reconnect with them after so many years.”

Kathy Cashman, along with sisters Susan ’72 and Patricia ’72, received an honorary doctor of science from Middlebury in 2008.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/04/23/academy-honors/feed/0Thank You, Mr. Neubergerhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/10/28/thank-you-mr-neuberger/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/10/28/thank-you-mr-neuberger/#commentsFri, 28 Oct 2011 16:29:55 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=6197I did not know Fred Neuberger well. In fact, at his packed memorial service at Mead Chapel, I was surprised by the many things I had never known about him: that he had been wounded in World War II, that he was a POW. He was a wood-worker, a practical joker, an advocate for diversity at the College. He was a man who took chances—that I did know about him.

It was a brief encounter in the late summer of 1969. I had been attending the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a few weeks away from returning to the Connecticut College for Women for my junior year. Until Bread Loaf, I had never been able to live, breathe, talk about writing 24/7, and as the conference drew to a close, I started having withdrawal pains.

And so on my last afternoon on the mountain, I came down to Middlebury’s Admissions Office. It was a lazy summer day, and the only person around was a man who introduced himself as Fred Neuberger. He asked me what he could do for me, and then listened as I told him about my two weeks at the conference, about my love of writing, about how I wanted to transfer to Middlebury. I was 19 years old, smitten with Frost country.

What I did not tell Mr. Neuberger was that I had applied to Middlebury as a senior in high school; that I had not gotten in; that it was just as well because my strict, immigrant Latino papi would not allow his daughters to go to coed schools. I didn’t tell Mr. Neuberger these things because none of them mattered anymore. I had found fertile ground for my imagination, and I was not about to let mere facts get in the way of a dream.

Mr. Neuberger handed me an application. I had plenty of time: the deadline was four months away.

“No, no, no,” I explained. I didn’t want to come to Middlebury a year from now; I wanted to come now.

“Young lady,” he said in that tough-guy, mock macho style of his. “Them’s the rules.”

I was close to tears; partly heartbroken, partly ashamed. Who did I think I was putting myself forward this way? “Okay, then I’ll just move here. I’ll get a job. At least I’ll be close to Middlebury until I can come here.”

Mr. Neuberger sighed. “How soon can you get this application back to me?”

I bolted up from my chair, as if I was about to fill in the blanks right then and there. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” By now I was hopping up and down.

“I’m not making any promises,” he reminded me.

But he had already given me so much: he had listened. He had heard the sound of a young person connecting with her calling.

Until Bread Loaf, I hadn’t listened to it myself. Two weeks later my family was packing the car to take my older sister back to college. I had had a standoff with my papi and mami: I was not going back for my junior year. I wanted to go to Middlebury.

The phone rang. Fred Neuberger was on the line. “Young lady, do you still want to come to Middlebury?”

I screamed. Even my parents were impressed, which was why, when we finally did drive up to Vermont from Queens, and my father looked around at a campus crawling with boys, he let me stay. This school had recognized his daughter’s talent, and that meant a lot to a man who had put aside his own talents to fight a dictatorship.

When I returned to Middlebury 17 years later to teach, I would tell Mr. Neuberger this story at every occasion. Then I’d let loose with a renewed sally of thank-yous. After the fifth time, he’d just sigh and shake his head. Enough with the thank-yous.

Not quite. Mr. Neuberger, thank you, one last time.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/10/28/thank-you-mr-neuberger/feed/3Food For Thoughthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/10/21/food-for-thought/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/10/21/food-for-thought/#commentsFri, 21 Oct 2011 17:21:53 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=6082Food. It’s not just what’s for dinner (that is, if you’re one of the planet’s lucky ones)—it’s also a powerful learning tool. At an October 14 gathering during Fall Family Weekend, a panel of students, faculty, and parents in the food field discussed with a large audience how a proposed new food studies minor could enrich the liberal arts at Middlebury.

Moderator Pier LaFarge ’10.5, now a Washington D.C.-based climate analyst, asked those filling the Orchard Room at the Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest to consider how food creates connections. “It connects the problems of growing population and increasing pressure on resources; it also connects people with each other and with their landscape,” he said. LaFarge noted how Middlebury’s agrarian location and its commitment to projects such as local food procurement and the student-run organic farm made the study of food a natural fit. The panelists then amply illustrated his point.

Professor Helen J. Young, one of the faculty members shepherding the establishment of the new minor, emphasized that students had initiated and driven this interdisciplinary idea. Young, a botanist on the biology faculty, added that food-related course offerings could span anthropology, public policy, economics, biochemistry, literature, “and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.” She further explained that the minor would comprise five courses, among which an internship or research project would be essential.

English professor Daniel Brayton gave a sampling of food references in literary works, noting their subtle ability to denote social class. As a lifelong sailor, Brayton sees particular potential in teaching food studies through what he termed “greater Midd”—Middlebury’s additional sites, including its graduate school, the Monterey Institute for International Studies, located at one of the world’s great ocean ecosystems.

Two students spoke from personal experience about food’s potential to teach. Kate Strangfeld ’12 took inspiration from a J-term class on food justice in Vermont to help found Crossroads Café, a student-run restaurant in the former McCullough Juice Bar. “It’s been the biggest learning experience ever,” Strangfeld said. “I’ve seen how restaurants can affect health, culture, and the economy.” As for the value of running a restaurant while holding down a heavy liberal arts workload, she said, “I’m so happy I didn’t go to a big school with a nutrition major. Here I see food’s many impacts.”

For Janet Rodrigues ’12, helping build an organic garden at a South Bronx middle school showed how food can nourish children and their communities in the face of social inequalities. In planting and harvesting she, her three Middlebury classmates, and the school’s students and teachers had to handle issues such as soil quality and invading rats from an adjoining business.

“I never thought I’d be speaking on this kind of panel,” she said, commenting on food’s power to take someone in a new direction. Rodrigues and friends helped kids grow fresh vegetables they otherwise wouldn’t have had while offering them new ways to learn about plants and insects. It was also important, she noted, to reach kids through foods they enjoyed, that their families could afford, and that resonated with their cultures.

The two parent panelists drew from their own careers to offer insights on what kind of education is relevant in the business of food. Chris Granstrom ’74 (P’07, ’13) and his family turned from growing apples and strawberries to helping pioneer Vermont’s wine industry. Their Lincoln Peak Vineyard, just up Route 7 from Middlebury, has established an enviable reputation for fine wines via new, hardy grape cultivars. While Granstrom credited success in farming to a personal curriculum that includes “some construction, some wiring and plumbing, business planning and marketing,” he credited the liberal arts with being fertile ground for food careers. “A lot of the new, dynamic food businesses, farms or otherwise, are being started by liberal arts grads,” he said, adding that a study program should stay abreast of food-related issues and recognize positive case studies.

Echoing the fit between the liberal arts and food and agriculture enterprises, Ted Andrews (P’13) credited his formal education with bestowing an essential farming tool: “I learned how to learn,” he said. Andrews is the CEO of HerbCo, an organic herb farm in Duvall, Washington that will produce $50 million in sales this year. Throughout its growth, the company has continually innovated to maintain the safety and wholesomeness of its crops—part of the learning curve Andrews has mastered.

Granstrom and Andrews’s participation on the panel was part of Middlebury’s new “Parenting the Earth” series, initiated by the Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest. According to Dean of Environmental Affairs Nan Jenks-Jay, “Middlebury parents working in environmental and sustainability fields are invited to campus to share their knowledge and networks with students. Some of these connections have even generated internship opportunities.”

Based on the questions and comments that followed the panelists’ comments, it was clear that these two farmers were not the only parents in The Orchard convinced that food studies merited a place in the liberal arts. As a fitting final course to the discussion, everyone moved into the lobby for a lovely spread of local food.

Please note: While the food studies minor is still in development, it will be essential for each student to undertake an internship. Anyone who might be able to provide a Middlebury student with such an opportunity should contact Lisa Gates, Director, Center for Education in Action at lgates@middlebury.edu.

Stay tuned to MiddMag for more Fall Family Weekend coverage, including links to the President’s address to parents, as well as audio and video coverage of panels and discussions.

“How Did You Get Here?” An annual series produced by the Middlebury Fellows in Narrative Journalism

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/07/07/how-did-you-get-here-moriel-rothman-%e2%80%9911/feed/2The Envelope Please…http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/05/25/the-envelope-please/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/05/25/the-envelope-please/#respondWed, 25 May 2011 19:58:44 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=4426Aw shucks. Middlebury Magazine has just learned that we’ve been honored with awards for design, editorial, and general excellence by the fine (and may we say wise) judges in the 2011 Circle of Excellence Awards, which is sponsored by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

Our winning entries:

College and University General Interest Magazines: 30,000 to 74,999 circ. (40 entries)Bronze, Middlebury Magazine, Winter 2010 and Fall 2010 issues

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/05/25/the-envelope-please/feed/0Voice Over Middleburyhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/03/22/voice-over-middlebury/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/03/22/voice-over-middlebury/#commentsTue, 22 Mar 2011 15:39:04 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=3724With technology comes change. Like, for example, how 50 years ago Middlebury students used pay phones to call home. Then, 25 years later the College installed telephones in every dorm room and billed students for their calls.

Now that 99 percent of Middlebury students have their own cell phones, the hard-wired sets in dorm rooms are a thing of the past.

But one thing that hasn’t changed over the decades is the recorded voice on the other end of the line when you call the main number at Middlebury College: (802) 443-5000.

“Welcome to Middlebury College,” a woman’s voice affirms. “For admissions, press one…” It’s a familiar voice, a friendly voice, one that faculty and staff have heard hundreds of times when they call in for their messages. For others, like prospective students and their parents, it’s a greeting they may be hearing for the first time. But regardless of how many times you have heard it, the voice is always pleasant and reassuring, kind of like speaking with your best friend’s mom.

So who is it? A vocal coach? A local radio announcer? No, it’s Peggy Fischel, the manager of telecommunications services, who is known on campus as the go-to person for telephone operations, but rarely gets recognized as the telephone voice of Middlebury College.

Here’s how it all happened: “When the College purchased its first automated attendant in 1986, a fellow from the development office recorded the original greeting. But when we got direct-inward dialing around 1996, we needed someone to record the new message. It was probably eight or nine o’clock at night when we finally cut over to the new system, so I said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and I recorded the greeting.”

Peggy Fischel, the telephone voice of Middlebury College

And Fischel has been recording the official telephone greeting ever since – not only for the main College number but also for the computer help desk, the Bread Loaf School of English, admissions, and a host of other departments and services.

“About 10 years ago, [executive vice president] Bob Huth asked me to add some new things to the menu in the 443-5000 greeting, so I said, ‘Bob, do you want me to get a professional to record it?’ and he said, ‘No, no, you’re doing fine. But I have just one piece of advice for you, and that’s to try smiling first.’

“So that’s what I do,” Fischel says. “Before I record every new message, I smile. It’s not that I am laughing or trying to sound jolly, I just smile before I dial, and smiling raises the level of the greeting a little. People should try it before they leave a message because it really works.”

Sometimes Peggy Fischel will look in a mirror too, just to make sure she’s really smiling in her Davis Library office before she records a new message.

Telephone services, which oversees campus phones, printers, and copiers, plus the voicemail, 9-1-1, and emergency notification systems on campus, was also responsible for rounding up the over 2,000 analog telephones from student rooms when the College decided to remove the equipment in the fall of 2009. Originally telephone services tried to recoup some of the revenue it had lost to mobile phones by selling the used equipment, but the market for used landlines proved to be so soft that the College ended up recycling most of the phones instead.

Today, any Middlebury student who wants a hard-wired telephone in a dorm room has to pay a $50 fee for installation. (Students on financial aid can apply to have the fee waived.) And Fischel says it’s a rare occurrence in today’s world of cell phones, Skype, e-mail, text messaging, and all the other forms of electronic communication.

“There are only about 25 students who have our phones in their rooms,” she says, “and the majority of them are international students who need the phones to speak with their families back home.”

But the person who records the greetings heard hundreds of times a day is not discouraged by the shift from landlines to cell phones.

“We have new people calling the College every day, and the first thing they hear is my voice. I always feel good about that because we all know how important is it to make a good first impression. And it’s my job to do it!”